How good is Unity for one person?

Hi everyone! I am planning to try Unity soon and I want to know what functionality does it have and how good is it in general for a single person. My focus is simple mobile games (hyper casual). I have some experience of creating a browser game in the past (javascript) and creating some projects in C++ so I am not starting from zero.

• For example how fast can I create a game like Color Switch in it?
• How much time will I spend coding? If I want to create an endless game with little level blocks that appear to the player randomly how much time should I spend coding this gameplay?
• How easy is the level creation process?
• How fast is the development process in comparison to Buildbox?
• Can you tell me specific features that Unity has that will be useful for an indie?

The thing is that I don't want to get stuck solving code problems and start actually creating the game itself but still have the freedom to be creative. I know that it's a very broad question but I want to know what is Unity before getting to learn it.

 

Oh boy. A lot? If you go here and start scrolling you can see some of them in a nutshell.

It's perfect for a single developer. It's easy to learn, it's feature rich, they are now trying to lead the field and have strong R&D department, so they started to become innovative as well.

You will need C# though.

I have no idea, couple of hours maybe a day? Never tried. And of course, it depends on your expertise and your experience with your tools including Unity.

Depends what are you doing. If you choose asset to build your game with visual programming, then almost none. If you choose to code, then a lot. Probably.

Exactly red. Easy for whom? I guess moderately and if you buy some assets from the asset store it becomes super easy.

This IDK. Never used Buildbox.

https://unity3d.com/unity#platforms
Later https://unity3d.com/unity#monetization
And ultimately https://unity3d.com/unity#assetstore

 

Unity is great for solo devs! The editor feels designed for solo dev use, such as having everything on a single screen, large asset store to get free or paid art assets, etc. For example, TUNIC was made in Unity by a solo dev.

Now to answer your questions:

Unity is one of the best mobile engines out there. It supports the latest features like Android instant APK (lets users preview your apps instantly), mobile dynamic resolution, built-in mobile analytics, etc. Most mobile games use Unity. They're also releasing Tiny soon, which lets you make hypercasual apps for iMessage for example, as well as playable ads. They also have built-in Unity Ads support. Also, Unity Remote which lets you test apps on the phone without building the game.

Unity used to support Javascript, but not anymore. Now it's C#. However, it should be easy for you to learn.

Depends on your experience. I'm guessing a simple prototype will take you at most 2 days.

Depends on what you're doing, really. Your example requires coding, but it shouldn't be too hard, there's tutorials on this subject.

For what type of game? Unity can do 3D level building with ProBuilder.

Not sure. Never used it, sorry.

• The editor feels very streamlined for indie use.
• You don't have to pay a single cent until you earn $100k a year.
• For mobile, you have Unity analytics, Unity ads, which are simple for a solo dev to use. Partly free too.
• ASSET STORE. Many, many, many free assets for you to use. Paid too.
• Huge community, especially in indie. Even more so in mobile. Many tutorials, many Stackoverflow or forum answers.

Unity solves a lot of boilerplate for you. Literally, you can just create a new project, drag a sample asset into the scene, add a rigidbody component, and boom, you have a physics object that falls to the ground.

Honestly, I feel like Unity is perfect for you. Especially for hypercasual mobile games.

 

Or TypeScript, if you are interested in the new Entity, Component, Sytem and Project Tiny: https://forum.unity.com/threads/welcome.593074/

 

Isn't Typescript set for deprecation in Project Tiny, though?

 

It is apparetly but not in the immediate future.

Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2vGYjWbI0TPRStIWx3UyNB8QqjNUj98

 

Define "level".

Unity is scene-based. A scene may be a constrained level in a 3D game, or it may be an entire city. But a level may be a list of difficulty changes for a word game or gem-matching game.

Depends on what you're doing. You'll hit limitations faster in Buildbox, but you'll start slower in Unity until you learn the engine well enough. After that point you're only limited by what you take time to code up. A 3D game takes infinite time in Buildbox, since it doesn't support that

It lets you make games. It builds to many platforms with the same or almost the same code. Unified shader code. Licensing ick for common middleware is handled for you. Programming is done in a language with plenty of learning resources.

Don't get into making anything if you're afraid of coding problems

It will have a shorter future than UnityScript though. TypeScript currently has the status of temporary measure until they finish a proper C# implementation of everything. Other platforms and the C# parts could land around the same time. TS will be output only eventually, and at the rate they've been developing it seems likely to happen in 2019.

I wouldn't bet everything on something with a lifespan of under a year, and it will only be useful on the web or for ads as most other platforms will want native code. You'll still be able to use it, probably, but now you're wasting time writing another language when C# is already there.

 

So, do not learn ProjectTiny until C# is fully implemented?

 

I'd say it's worth fiddling with now, but don't fall in love with the TS side of things just yet. They've mentioned many times that it's not the final form

 

Unity is fundamentally different than tools like Buildbox. Buildbox is designed for novices to be able to quickly assemble games from premade components with little or no coding knowledge or experience. That can be fast, but offers relatively little real control beyond what the provided components made available to you. Unity on the other hand is a professional level game development tool where you largely code your own components to suit your game's specific needs. This takes longer and will require more knowledge than drag and drop assembly of a game, but you're more or less in full control of everything.

That entirely depends on your skill level you have, and the quality you're going for. Could be anywhere from a few days to several months.

Again that entirely depends on how complex the code needs to be for your game, and your skill level. If your game is very simple, and you're skilled enough to write it quickly, it could be very little time.

A "level" is not a feature of Unity specifically, just something that is often used to inform the player of advancement in the game. Unity uses scenes, which is basically everything currently running in the game. Scenes can be loaded, added to with other scenes, unloaded, loaded again, etc. A scene could represent a single level, you could have all levels take place in the same scene, or a level may span multiple scenes, all depending on how you want to design your game. The process of creating a scene all depends on what you plan on putting in it. You might spend months or more building out an elegant landscape and clean intuitive UI full of self directed forest animals and realistic waterfalls, or you might spend an 30 minutes just making some clean looking buttons, or any amount of time in between.

With more control often comes more time investment. That is like asking how fast is it to draw a person in MS Paint compared to Photoshop. Well I'd have to say MS Paint is faster, but is speed really the point?

There is actually no feature of Unity that is not potentially useful for an indie dev.